The latest application of the month is KDE's most feature-packed media player amaroK. The overview takes a look at functionality including Audioscrobbler, cover management and scripting. We also have an interview with amaroK's team of developers covering their development process, usability and accusations of being hopeless IRC junkies. Enjoy application of the month in Dutch, English, French, German and for the first time in Turkish.

Well, the handling of music is great, but there seems to be a general lag in all passive popups when it comes to UTF-8 encoded Japanese (probably other large character sets as well). Unfortunatly, this is mostly only noticable to me in amaroK and juK. It's been kinda bugging me for a while, I guess you can take this as my bug report....

I think this is a general issue with FreeType -- it tends to be a little slow when loading large character sets. I see the same lag when doing (say) ls on a directory containing filenames with Japanese characters.

amaroK has worked very well for me as it has progressed from the first version I used-1.0 (a touch buggy at times, liked to hate arts) to the very stable, usable, and thankfully ad-free player it is now. It is impressive that it can play virtually every kind of audio file out there without much ado at all.

This application is my favorite. It's simple to use and handles a large music collection with ease. Thanks to all the developers who worked many hours to help make other's lives more enjoyable. I am grateful to each of you who work on this project. You have provided me with a music experience which brings me peace in my life.

and would be much greater if the polaylist stuff would work.
Best is however - they are working on it in the new release :) So - waiting a little bit and wishing the developers all the best for their efforts :)

What about some clean up? I mean, turning the "play" button to "pause" when in the "playing" mode and vice-vera. This space can then be used for a "record" button to record audio streams. When you return from work, you can then play the stream.

... and another person who loves amarok. its really an amazing player. i use the SVN at the moment, and it's lovely. nice work on the wiki, works very well. same with the sidebar, much better. and some other stuff that has been improved, keep up the good work!

As an aside, I use amaroK on my laptop and switched to MySQL to try to solve an annoying problem (it wound up relating to certain ID3 tags and a setting in amaroK... the solution is on the amaroK wiki). It didn't solve my problem, but it did substantially speed up amaroK searches and playlist creation by a factor of "waiting... okay" to instantaneous action. Very impressive, but it highlights that SQLite, while convenient, is not an ideal solution.

AmaroK is the best player that I've tried until now. It can do about everything I want to do with my music, except for these two things:

* Order chronologically by album. I mean, group music by album, order albums by year, order music inside the album by number (for most bands I can just order by track number, then year, but I couldn't find out how to do it if you have more than one album in the same year. I hear this is somehow better in SVN

* Mass renaming/tagging. This is the one thing for which I open JuK nowadays. I get a lot of albums in different naming/tagging schemes, and it is a matter of five minutes to rename and tag them in a consistent manner in JuK. AmaroK is good for manual tagging, but lags behind in Tag Guessing/File Renaming

But still, my favorite player, and I really wish it was in kdemm (so it could get the deserved visibility).

100 characters is not "weird." id3v1 is horrendously useless and amarok should most certainly not be writing them to a file. It should have an option at least, to ignore id3v1. It's the only thing that really annoys me about amarok.